Planning Diaspora: The Precious Few, Session #4

Taking the excellent advice of the gentlemen that wrote Diaspora, I opted to create a character in the campaign: Billy Sadan, a gun happy former agent of New Florida. This upcoming session, Joe is planning on running the campaign. The crew of the Precious is on the run, and needs to get to New Florida. Who knows, perhaps Billy will try to clear his name; After all William has the keys to do so.

The Diaspora rules lend themselves to this. Unlike other Fate games, which ask that you guess a non-player character’s aspect, Diaspora encourages aspects to be public knowledge and collaboratively created. After all the Game Master knows a character’s aspect, why shouldn’t the player know an opponent’s aspect.

I like the idea of enabling a player’s public knowledge to help drive the character narrative via the Fate point economy. Some of the mystery, and possible “big reveals,” can certainly be more challenging to pull off, but I believe the trade-off is fair. If I want the players to interact with someone diabolical then why not let them tag or compel that aspect; I’m sure they can come up with truly wicked things.

So it is with little reservation that I had the keys of the Diaspora campaign to Joe; After all he created the Vulcan system and William, the ship’s scientist.

I also believe that sitting on the other side of the table, as a player, will help give me some insights into how I can run my next FATE session.

So instead of focusing on this week’s campaign, I’ve thought a bit about the H-series The Bloodstone Pass Saga adventures, and how I might translate that to FATE (either Diaspora or Legends of Anglerre). What follows are two unit’s I created for the Diaspora Platoon Combat. Note: If I were running a Fantasy combat via the Platoon Combat, I’d likely grant each unit an additional stunt, and likely give “magical” units an additional stunt.

Dwarven Graybeard (T-3 Infantry leader)

Veteran 3, Command 2, Hand to Hand 2, Armour 1, Signals 1, Specialist (sink) 1
Morale: OOO OOO
Command Range: 1Battlefield genius: units can be one zone further from the Leader than otherwise allowed.Out of AmmoThis is the oldest trick in the book.I’ve seen it all before.